If one goes in search of it, the algorithm offers validation. Anti-vaxxers, 15-minute cities, something about 5G towers and bird migrations, chemtrails, fluoride. Watch enough YouTube and its algorithm will naturally and inexplicably take you to a video explaining why the earth is flat. Yet the mechanism of spread is not merely a Big Tech problem. Media researcher Whitney Phillips describes this dynamic as the “oxygen of amplification”, the idea that mainstream media coverage, even when critical or debunking, fuels the spread of extremist content by granting it a platform and thus legitimacy and reach. To report on the fringe nowadays is to feed it. The duty to document clashes with the risk of dissemination — there is no perfect position outside this exchange.

Investigative journalists Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson’s Conspiracy Nation opens at a “We Are Ready” rally at Sydney’s Town Hall in May 2023. The authors describe seeing a woman wrapped in an upside-down Australian flag holding a banner reading “GROOM DOGS NOT KIDS”. Meanwhile, they spot someone else wearing a t-shirt with the hashtag “Exposethe28”, a reference to a phantom list of twenty-eight paedophiles that a Liberal senator claimed to possess during a 2015 Senate Estimates. Near the front of the protest, giant Russian flags fly high. When asked why he was present, a man in sunglasses explains he is just out “for the exercise”. The two journalists overhear someone joking about drones with AK-47s. The scene carries an atmosphere of irreality, yet this is the texture of public life now.

From here, Bogle and Wilson trace Australian conspiracy culture from the 1996 Port Arthur massacre — thought to be the first homegrown conspiracy theory inextricably linked to the internet — through to the Wieambilla shootings in December 2022, when Gareth and Stacey Train, along with Gareth’s brother Nathaniel, ambushed four police officers on their remote Queensland property. Two officers were killed that day, as was their neighbour Alan Dare, who had gone to investigate the commotion. The Trains then died during a shootout with police, and were later found to be regular consumers of conspiracy content.

The book also documents how the Port Arthur truther movement grew from Joe Vialls’ self-published 1999 booklet Deadly Deception at Port Arthur — still circulating today despite Vialls’ death in 2005 — through interviews with those who knew him, including his friend Michael Macaulay, who describes helping Vialls get online in the late 1990s.

Since Conspiracy Nation‘s publication last year, the urgency of its themes has only intensified. In August 2025, sovereign citizen adherent and conspiracy theorist Dezi Freeman shot dead two police officers at his property in rural Victoria before fleeing into bushland for seven months. Freeman was eventually found and killed by police after an armed standoff. Like the Trains, his trajectory from conspiracy consumption to lethal violence was not an aberration but a pattern. The book could not have anticipated these events, but its thesis anticipates their logic: conspiracy culture does not merely interpret violence but enables and then distorts it.

Early in Conspiracy Nation, Bogle and Wilson quote Doppelganger, another book attempting to dissect the whys and hows of conspiracy thinking, where Naomi Klein writes that “conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right”. Here however they might have engaged more seriously with “vibes” — what philosopher Robin James describes as the way feelings circulate politically, becoming operative without ever quite crystallising into propositional claims. A vibe is neither a belief nor an argument: when someone says something like “this is such a vibe”, it describes a frequency that moves through bodies and spaces (online or otherwise), gathering force precisely because it cannot be pinned down. Conspiracy theories work as vibes in this sense: they are less about truth or falsehood than about the affective textures they produce. In this context, they exist to fill existential voids left by institutional failure, a way of making sense of precarity or alienation when faced with unresolved gaps in the official story.

In the 1996 two-part essay “The JFK Assassination”, later collected in Dirty Truths, Michael Parenti offers a proposition that should be considered mundane but somehow remains contentious: powerful people conspire because power rewards coordination, writing that

… wacko conspiracy theories do exist. But conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end.

The distinction deserves emphasis here. The material conditions of capitalism demand that capital organise itself behind closed doors where accountability cannot reach — the wholesale rejection of conspiracy claims function to protect established power from scrutiny. A “Note to the Reader” before Conspiracy Nation begins contains an acknowledgement that “conspiracy theory” is a “loaded term” […] “used to denigrate people with genuine grievances and to dismiss real conspiracies”. While this is clearly an intentional statement that acts as a preface to their reporting later — in how they write about subjects and interviewees with something that is not quite tenderness but isn’t contempt either — Bogle and Wilson are too implicit on their broader political project, often gesturing to Parenti’s logic but never quite naming it. Even though they do acknowledge in the opening chapter (“Think While It’s Still Legal”) that, like US institutions, Australian ones are “notoriously secretive and insular”, “the revolving door between politics and lobbying is well-known”, the Australian state “was built on violence and displacement” and “how it can organise itself against the interests of the people it claims to protect”, and “we’re living in an era where conspiratorial ideas have leached into public life thanks to politicians and the media”, the book loses its grip on this premise as it progresses, perhaps a symptom of shoddy editing that resulted in a litany of awkward segues and general clunkiness.

An example: in “Left Behind”, Bogle and Wilson provide a short overview of Gareth Train’s digital footprint, which, alongside the usual New World Order and antisemitic beliefs, included “the CIA and its defunct secret Cold War mind control and torture program MKUltra” — something the authors recognise as a “real” conspiracy but is glossed over next to Train’s belief that it is also a “far-reaching global plot that continues to brainwash Australian citizens into becoming mass shooters even today”. In these ways, Conspiracy Nation stops short of stating that the “oxygen” being supplied isn’t simply by opportunists but by the very structures of liberal democracy that claim to oppose them. While Bogle and Wilson include an aside on “diagonalism”, a term coined by Quinn Slobodian and William Callison, the mutually reinforcing tendencies of the real and the fantastical are understated. When real conspiracies sit alongside fabricated ones, the distinction collapses. The result is a new epistemology where everything is plausible because something is true.

But what is most jarring in Conspiracy Nation is a studied deniability about Australia’s entanglement with the United States — an elision that feels distinctly Australian. Bogle and Wilson note that many conspiracy theories active in the Australian imagination today are “American imports” and acknowledge that the language of “globalists” and “deep state” is US-centric political vernacular which first emerged on US-origin social media platforms. But it made me wonder if following that thread would require naming something larger about how Australian political culture gets shaped by imperial currents that flow in one direction only. For instance, it is not a secret that the CIA’s involvement in the 1965 Indonesian coup was known to and abetted by Australian intelligence. For a long time now, Australia has been complicit in imperial projects while imagining itself as an independent actor. When Bogle and Wilson document an epidemic of imported paranoia without saying explicitly who or what is importing it, they are inadvertently participating in the very journalistic neutrality that Parenti critiques. In a chapter on the celebrity-turned-conspiracy-guru Pete Evans, it’s mentioned that Evans has embraced Trump, visited Mar-a-Lago and aligns himself with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, but these seem to be regarded as biographical details rather than structural connections.

Most likely due to Wilson working undercover, the tenth chapter, “Activated Almonds”, is the most damning. It’s also one that exemplifies the book’s strengths and limitations. Alternating between snippets of Wilson’s time at Evans’s retreat, the authors chart Evans’s trajectory from charming co-host of My Kitchen Rules to the fringes of anti-vax activism, showing his brand of “conspirituality” as one example of how wellness culture and political radicalisation often merges. The one-week retreat Wilson went to in the Byron Bay hinterland cost $2750 a pop, where attendees sit together to eat obsessively-measured meals personally cooked by Evans and sit around campfires discussing vaccines and the New World Order, looking to him for answers to questions such as “How do you reconcile Bitcoin with a cashless society?” Bogle and Wilson show how Australian mainstream media was complicit in Evans’s evolution, as well as how Evans’s wealth allowed him to grift further, align himself with other unscrupulous actors and gain more parasocial acolytes, making clear that the infrastructure that made Evans a celebrity did not merely make him an influencer — instead it radicalised him, then rewarded him for it. Whether Evans’s transformation was accidental or designed becomes less relevant when the outcome is the same: a mainstream media darling becomes a vector for fascist propaganda. Whether the line between “legitimate” media and “conspiracy” media is as clear as we are asked to believe remains an open question. This recalls Parenti’s argument in Inventing Reality, wherein the most effective propaganda doesn’t announce itself as such.

As MR Sauter notes in Real Life, the apophenic machine does not merely amplify existing suspicions — also it exploits institutional failure. At one point in Conspiracy Nation, Bogle and Wilson document a woman in suburban Melbourne who found more support on anti-vaccination Telegram channels after her child suffered an adverse medical reaction than she received from health authorities. The book also describes a man who, after moving through family court and losing custody of his child, emerged convinced the Australian legal system was fraudulent. Who can blame him for reading the experience as evidence of systematic betrayal rather than individual misfortune? The calamity here is not that these people believed misinformation, but that the institutions meant to care for them operated with procedural coldness while conspiracy entrepreneurs offered belonging.

When the human desire for connection becomes a product, “authenticity” becomes monetised and sold back as truth. It’s also how catastrophes become fodder: within days of the December 2025 Bondi Beach shooting, AI-generated deepfakes of the gunmen and false claims that the attack was “staged” spread across social media. Researchers in crisis communication have identified this as a recurring pattern, whereby misinformation fills the vacuum left by limited official information after major attacks, shaping public perception and causing secondary harm to victims’ families. Meanwhile, the media manufactures consent for the fear of refugees and foreign powers, seeding the conditions where conspiracy thinking thrives — as in the mainstreaming of the Great Replacement theory and events which have followed as a direct result of Brenton Tarrant’s killing of fifty-one Muslims in two Christchurch mosques in 2019.

Conspiracy theories emerge from the accumulated weight of institutional betrayals that liberal democracy asks us to accept as the cost of doing business. In the last few years, it has become crystal clear that governments lie and do not face punishment. The 2008 financial crisis is almost two decades old now, yet we have not seen major bank executives get prosecuted. ExxonMobil knew about climate change in the 1970s yet continued to fund denial campaigns for decades. There is still no real accountability for the Stolen Generations.

Here, the Epstein files are instructive: they confirm real crimes (trafficking, sexual violence) while spawning fantastical ones (satanic rituals, cloning experiments). The documents show Epstein’s ties to presidents, princes, tech billionaires — and conspiracy theorists conclude everything is true. When institutions do admit to lying, they validate the method of conspiracy thinking even as they debunk specific claims. As Felipe De La Hoz writes in The Baffler, the Epstein conspiracies “muddy the waters”: survivors still lack justice in part because the noise of cannibalism theories and pandemic origin speculation drown out corruption and impunity. The question that Conspiracy Nation implicitly raises isn’t why people believe in conspiracy theories but rather why people have stopped trusting official narratives. Without being explicit, however, the book doesn’t entirely follow the gesture where it leads.

What do we do with this knowledge? When we call something a conspiracy theory, what work are we doing? Who benefits from that designation? Throughout the book, Wilson and Bogle seem to gesture towards those questions without ever arriving in the affirmative, the journalistic objective fallacy they were trained under perhaps getting in the way. Parenti’s distinction between theory and ideology becomes urgent here: while Conspiracy Nation documents the repercussions resulting from conspiracy thinking, such as when communities are fractured by vaccine misinformation or when democracy is eroded by QAnon-adjacent politicians, it seems less willing to examine the function of the label itself. Although the authors note that conspiratorial thinking is often pushed by well-funded organisations and elected politicians, the book stops short of asking whether these organisations are themselves engaged in something that looks like conspiracy ideology in Parenti’s sense — that is, the documented, material coordination of powerful actors to secure their interests, and how they have weaponised secrecy to protect power itself.

Ultimately, Conspiracy Nation is well-researched and proves particularly timely. In a time when conspiracies are no longer underground but mainstream in the same way that left-wing organisational tactics and insignia have degenerated into a lifestyle politics, we are seeing the many manifestations of belonging without collective political organisation. What is most striking about the book — and contrary to the moral condescension that characterises so much writing on this subject — is how Wilson and Bogle frame their subjects with care. There’s a certain sympathetic undercurrent throughout the book that refuses easy dismissal, in that conspiratorial thinking can happen to anyone in our current political climate but more so to those facing economic precarity, medical trauma or pharmaceutical distrust — vulnerabilities that prime people for exploitation by conspiracy entrepreneurs. In this, the authors do something that the left has generally failed to do. Bogle and Wilson understand that these are not random beliefs but a coherent worldview — one that offers explanation to people who have been told, repeatedly, that their unease has no legitimate cause. In the same essay in Dirty Truths, Parenti more definitively warns against setting up a false dichotomy: conspiracies are how structural power sometimes operates, and dismissing them cedes ground to right-wing appropriators. Thirty years after Port Arthur, Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigration, pro-gun political party One Nation is on the rise once more, with Hanson once suggesting that the official narrative surrounding the massacre may not be true.

Another thing that sets Conspiracy Nation apart from other investigations surrounding conspiracy thinking is that loneliness is discussed as a material condition rather than a personal failing. When people feel socially excluded, they endorse superstitious thinking more readily, not because they’re “stupid” but because the lone mind is easier to colonise than the collective. It goes without saying that paranoia doesn’t resolve loneliness, but when construed as special insight — as privileged access to hidden truth — it offers a palatable explanation for isolation. I’m not alone because I’m weird. I’m alone because I see what others can’t. This doesn’t address the loneliness but it changes the meaning, and meaning is often what people are desperate for when material conditions offer nothing else.

As Bogle and Wilson seem to imply but never state, what Eve Tuck and Wayne K Yang describe as “settler moves to innocence” operates quietly beneath this. “Australians are also prone to using the categories of what is ‘natural’ and what is ‘unnatural’ as a form of moral judgement”, a researcher tells them. The fantasies of reverting to “the natural” is inherently settler-colonial, imagining a return that never existed and laying the groundwork for fascist ideology. This is not hyperbole. Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini’s regime, wrote about “eternal fascism” — not a specific ideology but a pattern in which the appeal to timeless truths and a mythical past that never was is really a retreat from complexity. Writing a few decades later, Roger Griffin termed this tendency “palingenetic ultranationalism” — the fantasy that a corrupt present can be purified through the return to some pre-political purity. I’ll say it plainly: the anti-vaxxer invoking “pure” bodies without pharmaceutical intervention and the sovereign citizen claiming freedom from all law are not new inventions; they are the same fantasies repackaged for an algorithmic age. Further, as Jon Glover writes in Real Life, conspiratorial theorising is akin to an “alternate reality game” where mundane objects and gestures are imbued with an outsized significance and pursued and analysed with fervour. Combined with a quasi-religious faith-based rhetoric generated by values and not logic, it provides believers with an anchor that is simultaneously real and unreal, a Schrödinger’s cat of ideology. Parenti’s materialism and Tuck/Yang’s decolonial critique converge here in that both identify how power protects itself by directing suspicion away from the architectures that sustain it.

Of course, Conspiracy Nation cannot provide the answers to structural problems. The book simply documents and dissects the terrain with enough care that the questions become harder to avoid. Parenti noted that dismissing all conspiracy talk as pathological serves a specific function, producing a kind of ideological immunity for the existing conspiracies — the wage relation, the prison-industrial complex, the slow violence of climate destruction — that structure our day-to-day lives. Bogle and Wilson have started here. The next step is for us to name the violence that liberal democracy and class society require us to accept as “normal”. What is needed is enough political imagination such that people do not need conspiracy theories because they have real power over their lives. If conspiracy thinking is regarded as primarily a psychological phenomenon — a matter of individual vulnerability to misinformation — then the solution might be more education and better media literacy and fact-checking. But if we were to confront conspiracy ideology as a strategy — a way of directing suspicion away from the places where it might actually do political work — then the solution requires something more structural. A million isolated minds may find temporary solace through shared suspicion, but it will never build the solidarity that actual political organisation requires.

This is part of a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.